I am so glad you’re reading this, and if you are, you’re probably a close friend or family member and if you’re neither of those, you now are a friend! This first post is going to look a little different than what is to come, but I wanted to tell everyone what I am doing, the meaning behind the name “Hi Friend” and goals for this site! 

The name

Years ago I met someone that referred to everyone as friend, even if they met them 5 seconds ago. When asked why he called everyone friend, he said “You never know who might just need a friend.”

WOW!

Around that same time, I did some training for Alzheimer’s and Dementia care and in that training there was an emphasis on treating people with these diseases as our friends. Again, right in that same time, I met someone who was talking to me about a organization they were starting and the basis was about treating everyone as their neighbor or friend.

Ok God I hear you!

But it didn’t stop there, I heard a podcast or something of the sort, and the premise was about treating everyone as a friend. It seemed as every time I turned around, I heard or read something about treating everyone as our friends. God was obviously trying to tell me something.

In our culture/society we ask “how are you” as a rhetorical question, we use it as a greeting rather than a genuine question. Let’s be honest, how many times do we ask the cashier at the store how they are and expect an actual answer?

There are two major reasons for this :

1. We don’t want to be bothered by someone else’s problems. We live in a it’s not our problem society.
2. We also don’t want people to know that we have problems either.

Scripture actually tells us to do the opposite

“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” Galatians 6:2

I am not going to deep dive into these, that is for later posts, but you get the point.

So with this major lesson God was trying to teach me “Hi friend, how are you?” was born.

When coming up with the slogan/name for this blog, I played around with several different ones, nothing felt right. And just like God’s gentle nudges we got “Hi friend.”

Goals

Many people have told me to write a book, I truly have too many stories. What better title for the first post as “Prologue?” 

I know God can use every story, the good and the bad, the big and the small. I am not meant to keep it all inside, someone needs these stories, needs the redemption story, needs the hope, the grace, and whatever else. Needs Gods story. If it wasn’t for someone else’s willingness to share their story (which I will talk about in another post), I wouldn’t be here today.

Some of these stories include some quite crazy things and what I am not going to do is unpack or trauma dump everything here, but I will talk about some tough things. 

• Some of these will be: abuse  (physical, emotional and sexual), addiction, mental health (anxiety, depression and suicide) and etc. Every post that has these things mentioned will have a disclaimer. 

Now to some other goals:

• I plan to cross post on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, so look out for those!
• I plan to get t-shirts and possibly hats made with “hi friend” on them.
• Most of all, I pray that God gets all the glory and His story is shared most of all.

I hope you enjoy every bit of this and if you have requests, concerns, questions or just want to tell me how you are go to the “contact” tab. I would love to hear from you.

See ya later!

Oh wait!! One last thing, in the mean time before the next post listen to this song it goes along well with the next post.

Ok, now for real… see ya later!